Algeria takes hard line in standoff with militants

AIN AMENAS, Algeria Defying demands to give up, Islamist militant kidnappers who terrorized a remote Saharan gas field complex still held at least 10 and possibly dozens of foreign hostages Friday, and a senior official said there were no talks planned to end the standoff.

“They are being told to surrender, that's it,” the official said. “No negotiations. That is a doctrine with us.”

The United States said for the first time that Americans were among the remaining captives and confirmed the first known death of a U.S. hostage, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Texas. The LinkedIn social networking site lists a Frederick Buttaccio as a sales operations coordinator for BP, the British-based energy giant that helped run the complex, but a BP official said the company would not comment. France said a French citizen was known to have been killed.

“This is an extremely difficult and dangerous situation,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Washington. Describing a telephone conversation she had earlier Friday with Algeria's prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, Clinton said she had emphasized to him that “the utmost care must be taken to preserve innocent life.”

Algeria's state news agency, APS, said 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been killed since Algerian forces began an assault against the kidnappers Thursday. It was the highest civilian death toll Algerian officials have provided since the assault, which freed captives and killed kidnappers but also left some hostages dead.

The Algerian news agency also said that 18 militants had been killed and that the country's special forces were dealing with remnants of a “terrorist group” still holding hostages in the refinery area of the gas field in remote eastern Algeria.

It also gave a new sense of how many people may have been at the facility when the militants seized it Wednesday, saying that nearly 650 had managed to leave the site since then, including 573 Algerians and nearly half of the 132 foreigners it said had been abducted. But that left many people unaccounted for.

The senior Algerian official said there were other workers on the site “who are still in hiding” but that the Algerian military had secured the residential part of the gas field complex.

“What remains are a few terrorists, holding a few hostages, who have taken refuge in the gas factory,” he said. “It's a site that's very tricky to handle.”

Earlier Friday the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that not all Americans had been freed. “We have American hostages,” she said, offering the first update since officials confirmed Thursday that seven or eight Americans had been inside the gas field complex.

Nuland also said the United States would not consider a reported offer made by the kidnappers to exchange two Americans for two prominent figures imprisoned in the United States – Omar Abdel Rahman, a sheik convicted of plotting to bomb New York landmarks, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted of shooting two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Intensifying the uncertainties, a spokesman for the militants said that they planned further attacks in Algeria, according to a report by the Mauritanian news agency ANI, which maintains contact with militant groups in the region. The spokesman called upon Algerians to “keep away from the installations of foreign companies because we will suddenly attack where no one would expect it,” the ANI report said.

The gunmen, dressed in fatigues and wearing turbans, stormed in well before dawn Wednesday aboard pickup trucks, announcing their arrival with a burst of gunfire as employees were at breakfast.

The fighters with a group called Al Mulathameen, said they were avenging the French intervention in Mali, Algerian officials said. But there were indications that the attack had been planned long before.

“The terrorists were covered with explosives, and they had detonators,” a senior Algerian official said.

The attackers appeared to know the site well, even the fact that disgruntled Algerian catering workers were planning a strike.

Former captives said several of the fighters appeared to be foreign, with non-Algerian accents.

When the Algerian military eventually intervened, the situation grew more chaotic. According to one witness, Algerian helicopters attacked several jeeps that were carrying hostages. The fate of at least some of those hostages remains unknown, as the Algerian state news agency reported that 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been killed since the start of the operation and that dozens remained unaccounted for.

From the start, it was clear that the gunmen only wished to harm foreigners. Algerian workers, along with other Muslims who could prove their faith by reciting from the Quran, were herded into one area, workers said.

“They told us, ‘We are your brothers. You have telephones: Call your families to reassure them,' ” said Moussa, an Algerian worker who asked to be identified only by his first name.

Algerian women in the group were released right away, Moussa said, but the militants initially declined to release the Algerian men, saying it was for their own good. “We're afraid that if we free you, the army will shoot at you,” he quoted them as saying.

Foreigners, meanwhile, were taken away, their hands bound with rubber, both Algerian witnesses said. Some of the employees resisted and were beaten. At one point, the fighters shot a European as he tried to flee, both Algerians said.

Before being captured, Stephen McFaul, 36, an electrical engineer from Belfast, barricaded himself in a room with a colleague, quietly using his cellphone to reassure his family.

“I joked that I was from Northern Ireland and that I had been through better riots,” he told the colleague, according to John Morrissey, a representative for his family in Belfast.

McFaul, who had been sent to Algeria three weeks before, was seized a few hours later, Morrissey said, and placed in the last jeep of a five-jeep convoy that came under air attack.

The first four jeeps were destroyed, and when McFaul's vehicle veered off the road, he and a fellow worker managed to climb out of the back window, which had been broken. Their hands had been tied, their mouths taped and they had been forced to wear vests loaded with explosives, Morrissey said.

The two ran for the security forces, who disarmed the explosives.

The spokesman said McFaul was “bright and together and nervously excited” about returning home.

Others like Alexandre Berceaux, a French employee of a catering company at the site, hid themselves as best they could.

“I stayed hidden for nearly 40 hours in my bedroom,” Berceaux said. “I was under the bed, and I put boards everywhere just in case. I had food, water; I didn't know how long I would be there.” When Algerian soldiers came to his room, they came with his colleagues, he said, “otherwise I would never have opened the door.”

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